The Western Fathers: Being the Lives of SS. Martin of Tours, Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, Honoratus of Arles, and Germanus Auxerre

352 Pages·1954·9.769 MB·English

by  Frederick Russell Hoare

THE MAKERS OF CHRISTENDOM
Gtiural Editor: CHRISTOPHER DAWSON
THE WESTERN FATHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY SHEED AND WARD, INC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 54-III38
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS
Page
Preface vii
Introduction . ix
The Life of St. Martin
by Sulpidus Severus 3
Three Letters on St. Martin
by Sulpidus Severus 47
Two Dialogues
by Sulpidus Severus :
Postumianus 68
Gallus 122
The Life of St. Ambrose
by Paulinus the Deacon 147
The Life of St. Augustine
by St. Possidius, Bishop of Calama 191
A Discourse on the Life of St. Honoratus
by St. Hilary, Bishop of Arles 247
The Life of St. Germanus
by Constantius of Lyons 283

PREFACE
The biographical writings in this volume are the primary sources
for the Lives of the five Western Fathers with whom they deal.
If the purpose of this series were to convert the contemporary
pictures of the makers of Christendom into biographies of the
modem type, each of them would have to be pulled to pieces,
supplemented from other sources, interpreted in the light of
later knowledge and reconstructed on quite a different plan.
Since in actual fact the purpose of the series is largely to enable
the twentieth-century reader to see these makers of Christendom
as far as possible as their contemporaries saw them, it would
seem that the task of the translator is to preserve as far as possible
the feeling and manner of the original, and that the task of the
editor is as far as possible to put the twentieth-century reader in
possession of the knowledge of the setting of the Lives which the
contemporary readers had and which the writers took for granted.
As regards the translations, they have been made on the
principle that, though the primary duty of the translator is to
reproduce the precise meaning of the original, the mentality of
the writer is only half conveyed if the quality and idiosyncrasies
of his style, the peculiarities of his vocabulary and so forth are
all flattened out under the steam-roller of the translator’s own
English. And when, as in the present case, five or six contrasting
styles are involved, representing five or six quite different types of
mind and literary levels, the principle gains in importance.
But it is not only the certainty of at least partial failure that
dogs the footsteps of translators who follow this road. All sorts
of tiresome problems arise. How far, for example, should
patches of really bad Latin, such as occur in two or three of these
biographies, be reproduced in really bad English ? » Here I have
been inclined to fall back, perhaps weakly, on the good old tag
that “ one must draw the line somewhere ” ; and I have been all
the more inclined to draw one because the reproduction of such
vii
viii THE WESTERN FATHERS
faults would be mainly wasted labour, since they would in most
cases quite reasonably be attributed, not to the original, but to
the translator, whose own English can make no claim to be
impeccable. Nevertheless, here and there I have taken the risk.
Again, I have noticed that most previous translators of these
Lives (and not only of these Lives) frequently and silently correct
in their translations inconsistencies and illogicalities in the
wording of the originals. I am bound to say that I can find even
less justification for smoothing out inconsistencies than for
smoothing out unevenness in style. It seems to be an unwarranted
falsification of the original and, incidentally, results sometimes in
an over-confident corrector altering the original when the original
was perfectly right.
Speaking of previous translations (of which frill particulars are
given in the Introductory Notes to the Lives), it is right to say
that, although I have often referred to them and, on rare
occasions, borrowed a phrase, I have never taken them as a basis
for my own version, even for a single clause. It is one consequence
of adopting the principles I have described, that it rules out that
procedure altogether.
Lastly, I must explain three details in the arrangement of the
volume. First, the biographies are printed in the order in which
their subjects were bom. This order, which has much to
recommend it in any case, has in this case the incidental advantage
that it is also very nearly the order in which the biographies were
written, the only exception being that the Life of St. Augustine,
who was bom before St. Honoratus, was written a year or two
after the Discourse on the Life of the latter. Second, for
convenience of reference, the footnotes to the Lives are numbered
according to their position in the section, not according to their
position on the page. Third, as regards references to Holy
Scripture, when the numbering of chapters or verses differs as
between the Vulgate (and the Challoner version) and the Hebrew
or Greek and the Anglican versions, the figure in the Vulgate is
given first and the other figure follows in brackets.
INTRODUCTION
This volume contains translations of short biographies of five
makers of Christendom, written by men who knew them. It is
an essential part of the plan of this series that these Lives should
be allowed as far as possible to “ speak for themselves ” ; and
only in one instance in this volume, and then for very special
reasons, has it been thought desirable to make more than the
briefest comment on the technique or the value of the biography.
But in order that contemporary biographies written in the fifth
century of our era may speak for themselves intelligibly to readers
of the twentieth century, the reader must know something of the
state of the world and the Church in the fourth and fifth
centuries. Otherwise he will not understand the conditions under
which the subjects of the biographies lived or the special problems
that they had to face. For the writers, naturally enough, alluded
to these things and to the great personages of their day without
explanation, just as biographers do now. Moreover, almost all
their geographical terms need explanation, for few of them are
now in use and, if they are in use, they have in most cases
acquired a new meaning in the course of time.
The period surveyed is the hundred years from A.D. 350 to
A.D. 450, within which the active lives of these five makers of
Christendom were lived.1
1 It is difficult, in the case of a survey like the present, which makes no
pretence to great learning, to indicate very precisely its indebtedness to works
of authority. Of the general histories covering the period, volume I of the
Cambridge Medieval History, vols. Ill and IV of Fliehe and Martin, Histoire de
rEglise and vols. I and II of Hughes* History of the Church were kept at hand
for consultation or reference as I wrote ; and there are several passages in this
survey that are recognizably based on some passage or other in one of those.
Of special studies, Mr. Dawson's chapters on St. Augustine and his Age in A
Monument to St. Augustine were particularly helpful. Where I am aware of
specific borrowings of any significance, I have indicated them in a footnote ; but
there will probably be many cases of borrowings from past reading of which
I am quite unconscious.
X THE WESTERN FATHERS
I
The Church
When out period opens, with the young Hilary in the army and
the young Ambrose at school, the Church as a body had been
exempt from persecution within the Empire for nearly forty
years. For the first time since her foundation she had been able
to legislate for a period of peace and had done so under imperial
auspices at the General Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. There
she emerged from the catacombs with a structure recognizably
identical with her structure today and there she took the first
steps to devise regulations adapted to life above ground regarded
as a normal condition. By the middle of the century the adjust­
ment was reasonably complete and, on the geographical side,
included, as was natural, a certain degree of approximation to
the administrative divisions of the Empire, especially in the East.
(The Church was never confined to the Roman Empire—she
flourished greatly in the Persian Empire, for example, in the
third century ; but the Lives in this volume do not bring us in
touch with Catholics beyond the frontiers).
Everywhere the unit of her structure was the bishop’s see,
which was normally a defined territory centred upon a city. In
Egypt and in Roman Africa there were many bishops in villages ;
and a century or two later, in Ireland and Celtic Britain, bishops
were frequently attached to monasteries ; but these were
exceptions which died out. In Gaul, a land of many towns,
where the spread of the Church was very rapid during the
second half of the fourth century, there was an almost exact
equivalence between towns and bishoprics at the end of it :
there were three or four bishops in villages and three or four
towns without bishops ; the rest of its 115 towns were episcopal
sees.1
The bishop’s office had two distinct aspects, embodied in the
two names for him that run side by side throughout these Lives.
1 See J. R. Palanque in Fliehe and Martin, III, 462